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Experience Music Project

Perhaps you've heard of the Experience Music Project (EMP). It was founded by Blazers and Seahawks owner, Paul Allen. It's a museum celebrating American pop music, with interpretive to interactive exhibits. Dad, stop rolling your eyes!

They even have one of the first electric guitars ever made on display. Several Hawaiian steel guitars. And stage costumes from folks like Elton John, Stevie Nicks, Johnny Cash, Heart and Britney Spears (to name a few).

There is a huge Beatles exhibit, chronicling the start of the British Invasion. And of course there is Paul Allen's huge Jimi Hendrix collection. That's just a bit of what is on display. You can learn more about the EMP here.
Lisa in front of guitar sculpture Clarke poses in front of sculpture

Last but not least...The museum has an interactive demo lab, where you can play instruments. For ten bucks you can also buy a CD and they'll give 18 minutes in the recording studio. Ten minutes for rehearsal; eight minutes for recording.

Lisa can sing. Clarke, well he's never played (but always wanted to!) drums. There was no keyboard in the studio, so we put together a little shin dig with vocals and drums. Yeah, it's pretty cheesey. But, it sure was fun.

We won't subject you to the whole thing, but here's a little clip of us doing country singer, Colin Raye's LOVE REMAINS. Clarke didn't know the song, but he made an effort! By the way, it takes a few seconds to load. The quickest way is to run it in RealPlayer, which you most likely have installed on your computer. If not, download the free version.

The other option is to play the LOVE REMAINS MP3 here. It will come up in your default media player. This will take a little longer because the file has to download first, but it's an option if you don't have RealPlayer and don't want to bother with it. Oh, you will want to turn the volume up a bit because the levels on the CD were actually pretty low.

Last but not least, being in Seattle, we had to do a Heart song, with Clarke's impromptu drum solo at the end. Here we are wrecking part of ALONE. And again, here is the ALONE MP3 if you'd rather go that way.

Hope that was good for a few laughs! Thanks for visiting our vacation site! We'll be back with another photo album in the fall. As always comments, complaints or music lesson offers can be directed to Clarke or to Lisa.